Robbins is a manager himself, in charge of a conglomerate of
consulting companies and other various projects that he says
totals around $5 billion in revenue.

When we recently spoke with Robbins, he talked about one of the
management techniques he teaches his clients: Use leverage
rather than delegation to get the most from your team.

Leaders in any field learn early on that in order to grow, they
need to be willing to hand off some of their own responsibilities
to their employees, freeing them to focus all of their
increasingly precious time and energy on the things they are best
equipped to handle. But as Robbins sees it, most managers don't
handle this in the most efficient way.

When you delegate a task to employees, you tell them what you
want and when you want it by. You check in with them once, on the
due date, and if it's not finished or done properly, you become
frustrated with both them and yourself. With delegation, "you're
always going to be disappointed," Robbins said.

With leverage, you inspire employees to do something rather than
order them to. "When I leverage something, I help people
understand exactly what I want and why I want it, and then I let
them come up with many ways to get it done," he said. "I check
with them multiple times before it's due to make sure they're
supported." This way he's not surprised about how a particular
task or project turned out.

It's about aligning employees' interests with your own, and
making their work purpose-driven rather than task-driven. It's an
extension of one of his basic principles. "I teach people to
become obsessed with outcomes instead of activities," he said.

Robbins said that he wouldn't have gone from nothing to the head
of a coaching empire "if I was doing it all myself or if I was
delegating. There's no way in hell that would happen. But I know
how to leverage effectively."